


We'll Always Have Paris (or, uh, Brooklyn)

by rosalinddd



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1930s cinematic knowledge, M/M, and becca and steve are best friends change my mind, bucky has a big heart, but not really, how do i say this simply, kiss me bro, minor smut, old hollywood actor stan steve rogers, prewar, steve is a film thot, steve just thinks humphrey bogart is neat!, watch academy award winning picture Casablanca (1942)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-09-24 09:17:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20356084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosalinddd/pseuds/rosalinddd
Summary: steve loves movies. he loves watching them and talking about them and getting sucked into a good story. especially if that story has someone like humphrey bogart in it (yeah so he has a crush what about it). when famed movie casablanca (starring bogie himself) came out in the early 40s none other than steve rogers went to go see it. hmm.....and bucky.....goes too......what do u think........happens then.....





	We'll Always Have Paris (or, uh, Brooklyn)

It started in 1937, when Bucky had been out with this gal Rachel for three nights in a row that his ma had set him up with. Bucky seemed gone on her the minute they met, right on the front stoop of the Barnes household where Steve and Bucky had been invited over for a family dinner. Turns out, Steve hadn’t explicitly been invited, but Winnie happily took him in anyway. And it also turns out that it wasn’t a family dinner so much so as a clear set up for Bucky to meet this Rachel girl. George was late at work, or at least that's what Winnie peddled. So Winnie Barnes had made the Barnes girls dress smart, their hair done in tight curls and their white blouses ironed. Becca kept tugging on her waistline with a fuming roll of her eyes. The twins thought the level of etiquette set up in the house was the height of excitement and they talked back in forth in hushed snobby accents, keeping on like they thought they were suddenly Katherine Hepburn with the candles flickering on the table between them. Winnie didn’t pay them any mind with Rachel sitting across from Bucky, her short brown hair curled closely around her warm round cheeks and permanent shy smile sewn onto her clean face.

Steve thought she was fine looking, sure, but he didn’t quite get why Bucky was so damn enamored with her. It made something not sit so right in his stomach.

Steve just sat back, that night, and watched Rachel avoid eye contact with everybody, a blush high on her cheekbones while Bucky hardly blinked as he watched her, pushing food absently around on his plate. Never had Winnie hit the mark so well with her matchmaking skills as she did that evening. Steve had to shove more boiled whatever into his mouth to keep from groaning whenever he kicked Bucky under the table and he didn’t so much as breathe in response. 

Steve always knew it was a grand truism, an indisputable, fucking fact of life that when someone caught Bucky Barnes’ eye, that was it. He put every muscle and more into charming them, loving them, and wanting them something bad. Steve was always jealous of how Bucky could be so free and deep with his feelings. It seemed like Bucky genuinely fell in love ten times a day. Steve would settle for once in this damn lifetime.

The dinner had ended and Bucky walked with Steve back home biting his lip bloody and sighing. _So just ring her up when we get home, Buck. Christ, you're a sucker._ And Bucky had, and Bucky laughed with her for near two hours. Steve had retreated to bed tugging the pillow over his head to block out the unyielding sound. Steve sourly prayed he would fall asleep before Bucky came to bed but even if he had Bucky skipped in hellbent on waking Steve up and regaling the entire conversation as if Steve wasn't four feet away on the other side of the bedroom wall hearing every syrupy syllable.

_She's something, Stevie, really. The sound of her voice..._ Bucky buried his face in his pillow and muffled a cry of excitement. Steve's throat tightened at the sound and he had turned away towards the wall waiting for Bucky to shut the fuck up. Silly how often lately Steve was getting sick to death of listening to Bucky go on about someone else.

On the third quiet night of Bucky's abandonment of Steve for Rachel, Steve leaned his elbows on either side of the small window in the kitchen and pushed his forehead against the sun-warmed glass. It was early September and Steve had lost another job, this time down at the grocer. Bucky had eaten dinner across from Steve, kissed his cheek in hurried force then raced out the front door to meet up with Rachel. They’d seen a picture last night, which Steve was always a little gruff when Bucky did that, spending their meager supply of going out money on seeing a picture with someone else knowing it was one of Steve’s favorite things to do. There was no dancing in a theater, no dames to disappoint, no having to pull himself away from watching Bucky do both and then some. It was just Steve and Bette Davis. Steve and Clark Gable. Steve and Ginger Rogers. Lena Horne. Myrna Loy. James Stewart. Vivien Leigh, and oh Christ, _Humphrey Bogart_. 

On this night, Bucky was taking Rachel out to a dancehall uptown, someplace a little nicer than his usual haunts. Steve was both slighted and relieved to have not been invited. He hated the scene because of how it made him feel; small and awkward and useless. But fuck if he hadn’t wanted to be included in _something_, or just asked, especially since the past two nights Steve’s been spending his time sitting like some belle longing for her beau to return from war. It was embarrassing. It made Steve's skin prick with irritation when he found himself waiting on Bucky. So often, lately, it felt as though he was always waiting on Bucky. Steve chewed on his lip until he could feel his heartbeat in it at the thought.

Not a half hour out from the bustling exit of Bucky did Steve head purposefully into their bedroom and dig his thin fingers under the mattress until he came up with a few coins. _Their whiskey money_. Steve counted the pennies, shoved them in his pocket, and dug around for his shoes he’d kicked under something somewhere in that matchbox. 

The picture was new, one neither him or Bucky had seen and Steve didn’t really give any sort of fuck what it was about past seeing Bogart’s name on the marquee. He’d seen him in something for the first time a year or two ago and went home feeling real keen all of a sudden about the way a man like him walked. Kind of like how Bucky walked, all stride and spirit and allure and style. Steve slid the money to the woman who didn’t once glance up at him from behind the glass and then Steve made his way inside with the rest of the Friday night crowd. He sat in the middle on the edge and watched a boy gang of New York get taught a lesson or two by the streets and Bogart himself in _Dead End_. Steve huffed a breath of frustration when his character was taken out but when it ended, Steve snuck into another showing, his knee bouncing when the camera panned up to Bogie’s face for the first time. His smile, sometimes small, sometimes shark-like had Steve’s blood chill and sink into the meat of him on the walk home as he realized what it was that he was feeling.

He felt it the first time he saw a Bogart picture with Bucky. On the walk home Bucky had tried mimicking his voice to the best of his ability. Bucky moved his hands like him, swinging them in tight gestures around his waist. He copied his gait. The tilt of his head. Any little movement or sound he could do to get Steve going he had been trying. He kept doing it until Steve was clutching the stitch in his side and heaving for breath. Steve laughed and laughed, completely delighted with his effort and amused at the failure to replicate the irreplicable way of Bogart. Bucky grinned at him, small then shark-like. And he’d felt it right then and he felt it right now, halfway home, the sun already gone and his hands buried deep in his pockets.

It was one thing to feel a little fuzzy over his best pal, they were _best pals_. But to frame those admirations against another man, a wholly separate person. Bogie was a little more like Bucky than Steve had cared to admit. Or Steve projected too much of Bucky than he cared to admit onto Bogie. But regardless, Steve realized with Bogie it went further than just being charmed by his talent like the rest of the country. And if it went further with Bogie...

Steve came to a stop, pounding the tip of his left foot into the hardness below him, once, twice.

“Fuck,” He muttered into the empty street. It had been a long time coming but still, “_Fuck!_” Steve was more than simply keen on Humphrey Bogart. It wasn't like how Bucky sometimes went on about Astaire. Or how Winnie Barnes said she quite liked that Mary Astor's sweet disposition. This was different, no respectable admiration, nuh uh. It was just undiluted infatuation. Steve _knew_ it was that because he felt it when he was seven and Annie Robinson gave him a handful of Queen Anne's Lace. It made Steve sneeze up a storm, but still, he gave her his heart almost that minute. He drew her for a week until she did the same thing to another boy. And again he remembers how sweet he was on Becca for a month when they were in junior high. It started because she ate lunch with him and Bucky, telling him what to draw and how he ought to really comb his hair like Bucky, if he wanted any girl to give him the time of day. That one-sided love affair ended the day Steve watched Bucky knock Mason Shafer's front teeth out for kissing Beck's right on the mouth after school.

Steve walked home a little faster, thin breaths getting trapped in his overworked lungs. Jesus, was that late summer heat a bitch that year and not one bit helping Steve cope with that sharp-end realization. He pulled himself up the metal stairs fumbling with his key until he got inside. A breath of relief came when the door shut behind him and he leaned his back against it, closing his eyes and trying to steady himself.

_He wasn’t..he couldn’t be like that. It wasn’t like that_. He liked dames, he liked girls fine. Honestly. But...

“So, it’s like that,” Steve said to his shoes, letting the years of tidal, saturnine truths dry on his skin. Steve noticed then, in the lack of response from his shoes, the inconsistent drone of the jazz filling the room. His eyes popped open to search for the cause. He found Bucky standing stock still in front of the radio turning the volume up and down. Up and down. Up and down. Steve didn’t recognize the tune, he was never good at naming them like Bucky was. But he didn’t give a damn because Bucky was just standing without a word like he hadn’t heard Steve come in or hear Steve talking to himself.

He toed his shoes off and shucked his light jacket, hanging it on the second hook on the back of their door.

“Hey, you wanna cut that out? How can you listen to it like that?” Steve asked coming up to the side of the radio to get a look at the station and Bucky’s face. Bucky didn’t stop, he continued to turn the dial left to right and back again, blaring the harsh notes before quieting them then blaring them again right in Steve’s good ear. Bucky didn’t take his eyes off the dial when Steve spoke and Steve knew right then Bucky wasn’t ever gonna see Rachel again. He placed his hand on Bucky’s stopping the incessant turning and squeezed. Bucky finally looked up, eyes slow as they dragged like it was all the strength he had to look into Steve’s. Steve felt both awe and irritation that Bucky could get his heart broken in only three days.

“Oh, Buck,” was all Steve said before Bucky’s face dove into his shoulder, both of them breathing loud for different reasons.

"It's no big thing," Bucky mumbled against him. "It was me, Steve...I told her I didn't want her."

"The fuck you do a thing like that for?" Steve pulled away from him to stare wide-eyed at Bucky's tired face. Bucky shrugged and lifted a hand from where it was gripping Steve's hip and picked a nonexistent piece of lint off Steve's shoulder. "Bucky?"

"Kept thinking how...I don't know, Stevie. Some things are no good lying to yourself about and I—" Bucky bit his lip hard like he was trying to keep whatever it was he wanted to say in. "And I just didn't want her. C'mon, can we go on to bed?" And without another word they got ready for bed, Bucky stripping down to his shorts and Steve washing his face 'til it was scrubbed red, Bucky's words replaying in his head as he had leaned over the sink.

A few years since then and Steve had seen a Bogart film a year, sometimes with Bucky where’d he come out of the theater and say, “Goddamn, he’s got some style, I’ll give him that. Fuck though, Bette Davis. Jesus, Steve! Bette Davis!” And then he’d take Steve by the shoulders and shake him lightly as he closed his eyes and went on about her gams or her pretty mouth or the lilt of that sweet like sugar voice. Steve pushed him off and laughed agreeing and agreeing the whole way home while thinking more of the legs that carried Bogie like a force across the screen, his twisting mouth that turned into a grin, or the comfort and edge of his voice as it still rang in his ears. Steve's feelings for Bogie remained constant and comforting, sweet like an admiration should. But his feelings for Bucky...those only swirled and swarmed louder like a nest of honeybees in July.

A couple days before Bucky got his draft notice in ‘42 Steve had come back from seeing _Across The Pacific_ with Becca. Bucky was out again with his newest flirt so Steve dragged Becca along instead. She was just as gone for movies as he was, she saved up as much as she could as often as she could for her magazines about them. She kept Steve well-informed about the happenings of Hollywood. Who was caught kissing who and so forth. They'd spend hours poring over their reads on the rug in the Barnes' parlor, twins and Bucky excluded.

After Bucky’s notice, Steve didn’t get a chance to take Bucky to a picture the rest of that year. Or Becca. It didn’t seem to matter much when he left for basic the end of September, leaving Steve behind again to press his face into the sun-warmed glass of that kitchen window. Steve put his efforts into other matters; drawing, writing Bucky, and trying his damndest to get into that fucking war. 

His training was long but Bucky wrote Steve unbidden and committedly. He wrote Becca too, not with the same kind of near honesty Steve got but no mind, he and Becca would sit on their convorters rug in and swap them, read ‘em out loud, and tuck them away when they got reminded that it wasn’t any fun trip Bucky was on, though he never said a thing darker than what the bottom of his feet looked like. He kept it kind, he always kept it kind. And that frustrated Steve beyond belief. 

And then when Buck came home...when he came home and brought back a bag full of food for his folks and paper dolls for the girls, he would sit up at night in the dark next to Steve and sigh. One arm thrown over his eyes and the other tucked between him and Steve. Steve tried to get it out of him then, what it was like, the training and if he heard anything they weren’t saying on the radio or in the paper. Bucky would sigh again and roll away from Steve, mumbling how he didn’t wanna fucking talk about it. 

In early ‘43 Bogie graced the screens in something Steve was dying to see. He read about it in a copy of one of Becca's rags. It premiered in November but it came out everywhere else in January. Steve buzzed just thinking about it. Lately, Steve'd taken to trading his papers that talked about the war with Becca's gossips. For some stupid fucking reason, Becca’s folks were never keen on letting the girls hear about the war. George Barnes read his papers at work and left them there. Winnie Barnes got her news from him. And their radio stayed on music or stayed off. It drove Steve crazy how they wanted to hide the war from the girls, they were plenty old enough and that war was plenty big enough. So Steve snuck her the news and let her have Bucky's key so she could come over whenever she pleased and listen to the radio.

He’d invited Becca to the new picture, but she refused on account of her ma was pressuring her to see this nice Jewish boy. _Always a nice Jewish boy. Never a passionate one, or shit, at the very least a cute one_, Becca’d say before she sat herself in front of Steve’s sharp knees where he sat on the couch and ask him to braid her hair back. Bucky used to do it, but Bucky wasn’t here. Steve was getting better at it.

So Steve combed his hair back, used the last of the pomade on it and put on a clean shirt. There was a tear under the armpit but it was still the best Steve had. He snagged some more whiskey money, because Steve’s job at the paper was practically unpaid and his dirty drawings weren’t selling as good right now since he’d been sick for two weeks. He figured he could replenish the few cents later, maybe before Bucky got the chance to come home again.

He leaned down in front of the door to tie his shoes on, his least worn pair so the snowy sludge on the sidewalks wouldn’t dampen his last clean pair of socks. He was hoping to wait a couple more days before having to deal with the wash. Just as he was about to grab Bucky’s winter coat from the adjacent closet the keylock worked and the door clicked open. Steve shrugged the coat on without turning around, knowing it could only be Becca. Maybe she’d change her mind or her date fell flat.

“You decide you couldn’t stay away, Becks?” Steve mused before looking over his shoulder. His smile froze then dropped when he saw he was talking to the wrong Barnes. “Jesus,” Steve breathed and took in the glittering snow fresh on Bucky’s shoulders, the flakes caught on his lashes and sticking to the flat top of his fine army cap as he held it between his hands.

“Don’t tell me you’ve gone sweet on my baby sister. I’ll deck you before you get the chance to kiss my hand in apology.”

“Shut your mouth, you big fat mook, the day I’m sweet on a Barnes is the day I finally kill myself,” Then they were holding on to each other, Bucky cold and Steve giving him all the warmth he had.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you I was coming home. I told Beck’s not to say a word,” Bucky’s face was in Steve’s neck and his breath tickled the skin there. It felt like so long since they'd been here, tucked close and breathing in the outline of one another. Steve squeezed a little tighter.

“I’d say fuck you but I guess I’ve been missing you too bad,” Steve admitted, his hand creeping into the cropped hair on Bucky’s nape. It was smart like this, cut so close, but Steve missed tugging on Bucky’s roots.

“Yeah?” Bucky pulled back to look at Steve’s face and Steve took in the sight of his tired his eyes, the crinkles at the corners where he smiled. “And where exactly were you going out in the goddamn snow all by yourself?”

“Christ, Buck,” Steve rolled his eyes. He tried to pull away from Bucky’s death grip but it was in vain. “I can go places by myself you know.”

“I know, I’m only asking. You did your hair,” Bucky finally pulled back and cleared his throat as he let his hands fall to Steve’s hips. Steve sucked in a breath. “You got a date, Stevie?” Steve thought he meant it to come out teasing, like usual when Steve would disappear without Bucky and come wandering back home. But the words came out odd, no real humor to back them, and Bucky looked to the floor after he said them.

“What makes you think that?” Steve scoffed. Steve couldn’t remember the last time he went out with a girl that Bucky hadn’t set him up with himself.

“You just, um, got your best shoes on and everything,” Bucky forced out a funny laugh, licked his lips anxiously. Steve’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. This is how Bucky got when he was nervous and pretending not to be.

“Just didn’t want wet feet all night. Becca didn’t tell you? Figures, she likes giving none of the story. I sent you a letter about it last week. Was going to see that picture, that uh Humphrey uh, you know Ingrid Bergman’s in it,” Bucky nodded once and seemed to shake off whatever was bothering him. He beamed a smile down at Steve and clapped his shoulder.

“No shit, eh? Well I wouldn’t mind a picture. I know how much you like that fella Humphrey and all,” Bucky winked. “Don’t think I don’t,” Then Bucky’s arms snaked back around Steve’s waist and Steve didn’t bother hiding the smile. This felt good, it felt normal. Like it used to. And no matter how much Steve wanted it to mean the same thing to Bucky as it did to him, he’d take anything of Bucky he could.

“Well, can you blame me? You ain’t got nothing on him. No matter how much you try to walk ‘n talk like him,” Steve replied softly. They wore matching grins and Steve allowed himself to lean a little closer.

“Stevie, I could act him under the table. Say, don’t laugh you asshole. What’s he got that I ain’t?”

“Talent, baby,” Steve laughed and wriggled out of Bucky’s hold. Bucky let him get around him toward the door before grabbing him again.

“Big eyes, more like. You like ‘em big,” Bucky’s teeth bared and Steve could feel his face heat. He pinched Bucky’s side just to hear him yelp and shove him off. 

“You ain’t got the slightest clue what I like,” Steve opened the door and walked out with Bucky hot on his heels.

“C’mon, sweet‒_Stevie_, c’mon. I’ll pay and I’ll keep quiet. What are we going to see?” Bucky asked when he got the door locked behind him. Steve was already halfway down the steps when he answered over his shoulder, “Art, you classless motherfucker.”

Bucky muttered the title under his breath when they got to the theater.

“You couldn’t just say that? It’s _Casablanca_, just say _Casablanca_,” Steve couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of him at Bucky’s grumbling. Bucky heard it and joined in as they pushed into the theater. Bucky dragged him to a couple seats in the back and Steve stamped down the irritation. He hated the back, Bucky hated anything else. Bucky told him to hold his seat and went back out to concessions, coming back with candies to share. Bucky was a movie snacker. Steve couldn’t focus on anything but the film, he never shared a single snack with Bucky, and Bucky, bless his soul, never bothered Steve during a movie with them. He’d ask beforehand, already knowing the answer, if Steve wanted to share then shrugged when he got the same huffed response, the _how can you eat at a time like this?_

The picture began, and from that very second it stirred Steve up. The music made him sigh and costumes made him buzz the dialogue made him dizzy and Bogie, Jesus Christ. _Bogie_. He felt Bucky’s eyes on him halfway through and spared him a single glance before snapping his eyes back to the screen. Steve didn’t even look at him long enough to register the look on Bucky's face. Bucky looked away pretty quickly after that too.

When Bogart's character revealed to Bergman's that he’s sending her off with her husband, Steve and Bucky leaned forward at the same time. Steve’s hand flew to Bucky’s knee where Bucky gripped him right back and they watched their last exchange.

_”But what about us?”_ Ingrid Bergman asked teary eyed and hurt, maybe a little frantic to Humphrey Bogart who remained stoic but full of longing and love for her.

_”We’ll always have Paris,”_ He replied to her and Steve had plopped right back in his seat heaving a great sigh. Bucky shook his head next to him and pinched his eyes shut. Steve watched him, then, as he slowly, as if that way Steve wouldn’t notice, swiped a thumb under his left eye. That one always filled up and spilled over first when Bucky got teary. 

The great thing ended and the masses filed out and Steve stayed glued to his spot, Bucky’s hand still clutched over his.

“Y’ever wanna love someone like that?” Bucky asked, drawing circles in the fabric of his trousers with his other hand. Steve thought about Bogie and all his want for Bergman and how he made her leave Casablanca in the end. He thinks of the let it go kind of love, the one built on something that's lasted a long time and even when it gets torn up it still lasts because it’s still there. It’s that lingering kind of selfless love that made you put the other person first, no matter what. Truth was, Steve wasn’t so sure he was good enough for a love like that. And the bitter truth was, he might already be twenty-six years deep into it.

“I‒“ Then Steve shut his mouth because he knew he was feeling too romantic and too compelled and he wasn’t gonna say the wrong thing for the world. He wasn’t gonna ruin this by saying Bucky sure as hell did, even if he didn’t. 

Steve looked over at Bucky who still had his eyes on the screen where it hung black. The theater was empty then, the last couple just shuffling out. Steve knew they had to head out before they got kicked out but then Bucky looked up at him then over both his shoulders, maybe making sure they were alone, and then without another word he leaned in, knocking his forehead hard against Steve’s. Steve winced with a, “Ow, you rotten‒”

“Shit, ‘m sorry, Steve,” Bucky pulled back an inch shaking his head and breathing a string of hot air over Steve’s face. His breath smelled like the lemon candies he practically inhaled in the first half hour of the movie making Steve’s mouth prickle with the memory of sour fruit. Bucky was still caught staring at Steve, watching all the features of his face, maybe trying to figure something out. Steve punched his shoulder to knock Bucky out of it.

“Let’s get home, I’m beat,” Steve took his hand back from Bucky’s and stood up, the recent closeness of Bucky making him feel drunk and off balance. Steve slipped past Bucky, his legs knocking into Bucky's knees as he squeezed past. Steve heard Bucky clear his throat behind him and haul himself up out of his chair to follow Steve out of the theater.

The walk back to the apartment was quiet, no other sound but their shoes scratching against the uneven sidewalk, until Bucky went, “I got big eyes too, right Steve?”

Steve took a very long, deep breath.

“Sure.”

“You like ‘em?” Steve stopped walking to look at Bucky where he stopped, his hands in his pockets and head bent down. He was biting his lip red and it made Steve’s heart skip more than normal. 

“Yeah, pal. You got nice eyes. You really need me to tell you that?” Then Bucky was silent the rest of the way, making for their room to strip out of his uniform as soon as they got inside. Steve followed him slowly, watching Bucky's fingers twitch at the buttons on his jacket. Steve braced himself against the door frame and waited for Bucky to look up at him. 

“I see the way…” Bucky’s hands fell to his sides, leaving his jacket half undone. “Sweetheart, I see the way you look at that cad.”

Steve tightened his arms around himself, felt his heart stutter like it did that day in ‘37 when he realized what Bucky was realizing right then. Steve never thought himself obvious and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this was just Bucky proving he knew Steve better than himself. Whatever it was, Steve faced it like any other fight. Chin up. Jaw squared. He waited for the blow, the nasty leer, the disappointed lecture. But Steve knew in the second after he expected something to happen that nothing like that could come from Bucky. Not his Bucky. Even in the basest cruelties, Bucky had always remained kind.

So Steve waited on his mercy. And when Bucky said nothing Steve took another deep breath.

“Don’t call him a cad,” was all Steve could think to say. Bucky went back to his jacket then shook it off his shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Numbly, he got to work on his belt. Steve swallowed at the clang of metal echoing in the room.

“Not gonna deny it? What I’m gettin’ at?” Bucky asked as his trousers hit the floor. Left in his shorts and undershirt, Bucky scooped his uniform up and laid it over the wooden chair in the corner of their room. When he turned back to Steve, his eyes looked wild. He looked frightened and flushed and something else Steve'd never seen before.

“What’re you getting at, Barnes?” Steve cocked his head to the side, studying Bucky’s body language. He couldn’t make him out, fuck he couldn’t read this moment for shit. Steve started to feel frightened all of a sudden too.

“You know what I’m saying,” Bucky shook his head and took a slow step closer. Steve straightened with fists clenched at his sides.

“No, don’t think I do. Gonna need you to say it,” Steve gritted out. If that was how their friendship went out then so be it, Steve thought.

“Steve‒”

“Say it,” This time it was Steve who took a step closer. They were nearly chest to chest and Steve felt the force of Bucky’s heaving breaths mixing with his own.

“_Steve‒_”

“Buck!”

“You’re queer!” Bucky all but yelled. Steve stilled. Bucky sagged in front of him, eyes closing. “You’re...queer, Steve. I know that,” There was a long beat of silence where neither of them could look away from each other.

“Sorry,” Steve finally whispered, the fight eeking out of him.

“What’re you sorry for?” Bucky grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him like he was about to wax poetic about Bette Davis. Steve let him, instead of trying to lay him on his ass. The petulant rage burned out in the face of what may come. “Jesus, Steve don’t you understand? I‒” Then Bucky had just stared at him, his eyes darting back and forth between Steve’s as his mouth opened and closed. 

Steve reached a hand out, sparked by the shock and warmth on Bucky’s face, and fisted the front of Bucky’s undershirt. Bucky didn’t pull away. Instead Bucky leaned closer, then closer still, until his forehead hit Steve’s collar. Steve’s other arm swept around his shoulders holding him there.

“You like my eyes, Steve?” Bucky murmured against his shirt and Steve breathed out a weak laugh. One of Bucky’s hands grabbed his hip, his thumb slipping under Steve’s waistband and _of course_, of course. Steve had been a fool. Steve was a goddamn cluck. Bucky’s other hand went and undid Steve’s top shirt button so Bucky could nose against Steve’s bare skin. 

“You know I do,” Steve grated out, heart pounding and hands going to grip in Bucky’s hair. Bucky pressed his open mouth to Steve’s collarbone, sucking on him there then soothing it with tiny licks. He repeated the motion up Steve’s throat, over his jaw, and all the way until he reached Steve’s mouth. When Bucky kissed him, Steve breathed out his name into Buck’s mouth.

“I’ve been missin’ you, sweetheart. I’ve been,” Bucky kissed around Steve’s face, over his cheeks and eyelids and nose. “I’ve been missin’ touching you when I’ve never even touched you at all,” Steve moaned and pulled Bucky over to the bed, pulling him down over him as they tumbled. 

“I’m here now,” Steve gasped as Bucky pulled his belt loose and began shoving down his trousers and shorts in one go. “We’re here now, Bucky.”

“Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you,” Bucky pulled off the rest of Steve’s clothes, then his own in a mad flurry.

“Want everything you’ve got,” Steve locked his arm around Bucky’s neck to keep him close enough to kiss. “We’ve got time, now, see. Bucky, we’ve got time.”

That slowed Bucky’s fervor and they simply stared at each other for a moment, searching one another’s flushed faces.

“Steve?” Bucky whispered.

“Yeah, Buck?” Steve whispered back.

“I’m pretty gone on you,” Bucky’s features went liquid like the admission took the tension right out from every muscle in his body. Steve laughed.

“You don’t say?”

“Shut up, you lug,” Bucky buried his face into Steve’s shoulder then let a hand creep down Steve’s chest to tickle teasingly right below his navel.

“Come on then,” Steve encouraged him. Steve took a hand and placed it over Bucky’s to lead him to where his cock laid hard. Bucky took him in his hand and pumped a couple times before flicking his thumb over the head getting Steve to arch off the bed.

“Bet your Humphrey Bogart can’t make you feel like I can,” Bucky grinned down at Steve, that sharklike, cat got the cream smile.

“Bet he could make me feel better,” Steve teased back.

“You say the word, sweetheart, and I’ll put my clothes back on. Ain’t no skin off my nose.”

“You‒” Steve moaned as Bucky twist his hand around him. “You are not going anywhere. Trust me.”

“I do,” Bucky breathed into Steve’s mouth before he kissed him again.

Bucky brought him off like that, with his hand, and not a minute after Steve came with a muffled cry he was scooting down the bed to take Bucky in his mouth and get him off too. After, they laid there catching their breath against each other and then falling asleep just like that.

When Bucky’s furlough was up at the end of the week, he stood before the front door holding Steve’s face in both hands, thumbs brushing gentle over Steve's cheeks. He kissed his nose, slow as can be, and smiled cheekily when Steve tried to lean in for more.

“Wanna give you something to miss, pal,” Bucky licked his lips.

“No way, you big fat mook. You lay one on me right now.”

“Sure thing,” Then Bucky did, nice and sweet and when he pulled away Steve’s eyes were still closed when he murmured through the wintry morning glow, “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

**Author's Note:**

> my first stevebucky oneshot.......sumn to think about. 
> 
> now go read my 45 chapter stevebucky fic thx hehehe :)


End file.
